mission

As the world marks Indigenous People Day (August 9), we in Crownpoint, New Mexico, celebrate what we have come to know over decades as the best of the Navajo people and character.

Crownpoint, in northwest New Mexico, is on the Trail of the Ancients, where prehistoric archaeological and geological sites bear witness to the ancient Puebloan, Navajo, Ute and Apache people who called this part of the West their home. It’s also on the Navajo reservation.

We Adorers are relative newcomers, the first of us arriving in Crownpoint in August 1982.

Two small and little-known organizations in St. Louis have given me pause to reflect on how good grows from goodness.

The Immigrant and Refugee Women’s Program, housed in an Episcopal church’s parish hall basement, provides English teachers for immigrant and refugee women as they learn to navigate American culture and the English language.

The women who staff the program are competent, compassionate, caring, and concerned about their students and teachers. Each teacher is matched with a student and provided with the trademark teacher’s bag full of notebooks,

With Korea very much in the news, we turn to Sister Bernadine Wessel, ASC, who worked there from 1977 to 2013, teaching conversational English to children and adults; translating for migrant workers and encouraging them; and working with children.

By Sister Bernadine Wessel, ASC

We in the West are accustomed to hearing the terms North and South Korea, a division that occurred at the end of World War II.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Korea was under the control of Japan, which tried to make Korea and Koreans Japanese.

A little more than a year ago, I moved from my university job at Newman University in Wichita, Kan., to run an NGO (non-governmental organization) in New York. In my work for Partnership for Global Justice, I frequently attend meetings at the United Nations.

You get numb to them after a while. But one particular meeting in March left me feeling overwhelmed. The topic was the inhumane treatment of women and girls, including rape and sexual violence in war.

About Us

We are the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, a vowed religious community of Roman Catholic women who were founded in 1834 as a teaching order by the Italian, St. Maria De Mattias, in the small town of Acuto Italy. Worldwide, we are 2,000 women strong, including 200+ in the U.S.